economics

"Dear Old People Who Run the World"

by OpenConceptual on 07-09-2009

in commentary

Umair Haque at Harvard Business Blogs has written a Generation M Manifesto, which begins: Dear Old People Who Run the World, My generation would like to break up with you. Everyday, I see a widening gap in how you and we understand the world — and what we want from it. I think we have irreconcilable differences. [...]

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David Warsh at Economic Principals has a very complimentary piece this week about Mark Thoma’s Economist’s View: Economist’s View is a lightly-edited aggregation of items from around the Web – newspaper columns and blog posts mostly, plus the occasional podcast or video, continually updated throughout the day and augmented periodically by Thoma’s own commentary, all [...]

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I first saw Tom Brokaw talking about this historical moment as “a reset” when he was talking about the AIG bonuses on Meet the Press a month or so ago (I just happened to tune-in for the first time in ages). Then today when I saw his op-ed in the New York Times start with [...]

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Good Old Days Ahead

by Brian on 04-18-2009

in economics

For the Wall Street Journal yesterday Peggy Noonan mentioned a Michigan family that, “under financial pressure, decided to give up credit cards, satellite television, high-tech toys and restaurant dining, to live on a 40-acre farm and become more self-sufficient.” The story originally ran in USA Today: The paper weirdly headlined them “economic survivalists,” which perhaps [...]

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Boston’s case illustrates the difficulty you’d have establishing a new startup hub this late in the game. If you wanted to create a startup hub by reproducing the way existing ones happened, the way to do it would be to establish a first-rate research university in a place so nice that rich people wanted to live there. [...]

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Ex Industrialism

by Brian on 03-29-2009

in business,civics,economics

The ideas from my last post grew out of a line of thought I’ve been running for a couple of weeks and alluded to a few times before. The gist is that capitalism and socialism/communism share a few core assumptions. They’re two varieties of industrialism. They came of age at the same time, with reference to [...]

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The AIG bonuses have marked a turn, for the worse — not economically but socially, or morally. The disgrace of the bonus-giving itself has been dwarfed by the populist reaction against them. Matthew Yglesias has pointed to some of the best bits from around the web — especially via this post quoting Brad DeLong on compensation reform (also [...]

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China: Mother of All Enrons?

by Brian on 03-17-2009

in economics,global

Directly following up on my last post about the problems of goals gone wild, here’s a look at China’s attempts to keep up their 8% rate of annual GDP growth. (Thanks to Francois in the previous post’s comments for bringing up the abuse of information during China’s Cultural Revolution.) Earlier today, FP Passport reported the World Bank’s quarterly [...]

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“It’s Still Burning…”

by Brian on 03-16-2009

in economics

  In his interview on 60 Minutes, Ben Bernanke gingerly offered the analogy that if your neighbour lit his house of fire by smoking in bed you might be disinclined to help put it out because he had it coming. But if your own house is made of wood you can’t afford to be passive. [...]

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Learned this one from Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution. (I seem to deriving a lot from him lately… could do worse). Cowen is great for “economics of everyday life” kind of thinking; this concept comes by way of posts about high school bands and Ross Douthat’s career move from The Atlantic to the New York Times, which [...]

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The Global Depression

by Brian on 03-06-2009

in business,civics,economics

Most people in our society today have never experienced a depression. We’re not unlike a class of twelve year-olds being presented with something new and uncomfortable in sex-ed class. We’re used to hearing about it but it’s mostly strange — and it’s not something most of us are used to talking about when it actually affects our [...]

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This article is amazingly rich… I’m still playing with all the threads. Michael Lewis comes through again — huge (literally, at about 10,000 words) – this time for Vanity Fair with a piece on the economic crisis in Iceland: ”Wall Street on the Tundra.” Highly recommended [via Felix Salmon]: Back away from the Icelandic economy and you can’t help but [...]

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